Scion: The Sound of Silence

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Going Home Is Never Easy

14

JAN/11

Frith and Ty decide to go home, to see their mothers and to pick up some stuff they’d left after leaving the army; namely weapons and armour. They debate along the way whether or not to tell their mothers what’s going on. It’s a short debate. They’re both too honest to keep things from their mothers. It becomes less of a matter of whether or not and more a matter of how and when to let their beloved mothers know.

Along the way Frith’s phone rings. It’s Horace Farrow, returning her call. The conversation is a little stilted. The cowboy is clearly surprised and neither side really has a lot to say other than letting the other know that they’re there. Farrow seems to make a better impression that Donnie Rhodes did and the call ends with the two having networked a little, with an understanding that each is available for help should the other need. There is no thought, however, or ‘teaming up’. Each is busy with their own thing.

Ty also receives a call, from Colonel Truman, his old commanding officer. It appears that the old soldier considers Ty still in the military, and Ty’s resignation as ‘just a phase’ that he’s bound to grow out of. In either case he asks Ty for a favour. A soldier from the 41st Airbourne Rangers, on loan to the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (on the hush hush) as a scout and observer has failed to report in. Truman asks Ty to go find him. Ty, ever the good soldier, says he will and Truman sends the dossier to Ty’s phone.

Steve Blairre, said Ranger, was on loan to the Bureau due to his extensive skill in survival and ability to stay hidden in the field for long periods at a time. He’s there as a watcher, deployed to Waco, Texas, where another group has set up where David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult had once been. This has, obviously, made the locals nervous and when the Bureau got wind that the new group were smuggling in weapons they asked for help and received Blairre. He was supposed to watch and report but stopped reporting in a while ago. That makes sense enough to the cousins. What immediately stands out to Frith is that Blairre’s handler, his go between, is not located in Waco but in Washington DC, too far away to be of any use. That makes no sense to her at all. Ty, less experienced in such things, defers to Frith’s instincts on this and they both make a note to look into it after they’ve visited home.

The cousins arrive in Kellogg to find their mothers delighted to see them at first. It doesn’t take long, however, before their mothers become pensive. It’s clear that something’s worrying them. Ty and Frith go out for supplies and Ty finds out that, despite being gone for years, the women of the town still remember him and at the supermarket Ty is cornered by one of the girls he used to date, with children of her own now, still intent on making him the baby-daddy. He flees and returns home to dinner and family time. Then Beth and Lisa do the unthinkable. They seperate Frith and Ty, each mother taking their child aside, to talk to them alone. This prove sto be a bad idea. They confront their children, stating that they know the truth of who their childrens’ fathers were and are. They admit to lying to their children. Their romances with Tyr and Foreseti were not one-night-stands but longer romances that ended when the two gods revealed who and what they were. Both offered to take their lovers away to somewhere better, perhaps even Asgard itself. But when Tyr admitted to being married Lisa refused to go with him, refusing to be like her oldest sister and giving up her dignity in return for comfort. Beth, also angry, refused to leave her sister and gave Forseti the same marching orders Lisa had given Tyr. Both women demanded that the gods leave their children alone and never return.

Then it all goes wrong.

Without Ty to soften her cold logic, Frith soon has her mother in hysterical tears and throwing things at her before throwing her out of the house in a sobbing wreck. Ty fares no better as his mother uses logic, to which he has no Frith there to deflect. Fortunately for Ty the sounds of Beth’s hysterical rampage de-rails Lisa’s own line of thought and Lisa heads in to try to calm Beth down, leaving Ty to take Frith out back and into the woods while they both try to work out just what has gone on.

The mood in the forest behind the Lawson property is anything but jovial. Both Scions are very hurt at the lies their mothers have told them. Despite their mothers’ pleas that the lies were to make things easier on them, that explaining that their father’s were gods would have been impossible to believe, the Scions are angry. Despite the explanations from the Scions that they are what they are and always had been, that they’d only have been killed if they had never been Visited, Beth and Lisa remain distraught. Ty, in a fit of fury, punches a tree with all of his not inconsiderable might, shattering it. He kicks the stump far into the distance, shattering his own foot into uselessness and then being amazed to watch it re-knit itself from a bloody mess into healthy pink skin. But even that isn’t enough to settle things down.